Astrocade Interface – Changing the Settings

Once you have the DE10-Nano and interface board in your cabinet, it is quite likely that you will want to change the DIP settings.

To do this, once the relevant game has started then you need to press the OSD button on the interface PCB.

This will bring the MiSTer menu up on the screen. These pictures were taken with Gorf running. (DIP options will vary from game to game)

To navigate the options on the screen you can use Player 1 joystick up / down (to move selector) or left / right (to switch to other menu screens) and then fire button to select. To close the menu screen and return to the game press the OSD button again.

Since we want to change the DIP settings, then we will move the white selector bar down to “DIP Switches” and press fire.

Now we have the options for Gorf shown, we can select any of them and then press fire to cycle through the options. Once we have complete the changes we can select “Reset to apply”

Just a quick note on Gorf settings as they may not all be obvious.

• Sound Mix – In the cabinet, speech is only played on the lower speaker (which switches between FX and speech). If you select stereo then speech is mixed with the sound effects on both speakers.
• Stars – One Gorf sets has brighter stars than the other and one user preferred that look, but wanted the other version running. Bright boosts the stars.
• Frame Advance – On the original, if you enable the service switch once you have started the game, then you can use the Start 1 button to skip from the current mission to the next. Once the game ended, if the service switch was still on it then went into test mode. You can now use this dip setting to enable the option instead without having to keep changing the service switch.
• Cabinet service / Tilt – If this is set to Off then the signals from the cabinet for the service button and Tilt are ignored. You can still get into service (if you wanted to) using the Service DIP setting instead.

If instead you wish to switch to another game, Gorf has two variants for instance, then once the OSD screen has been displayed, simply move the joystick right and you should see an option at the top “Core”. Pressing fire on this will the list the games you can play. Select the one that you wish to load and press Fire again. The MiSTer has been configured to reload whichever core was in use when you switch it off, so if you change to another game then that will be the one that it loads on startup in future.

It is possible to add other games to the memory card, for more information about that you would need to see the MiSTer documentation. Some will need additional memory fitted to the DE10-Nano to work.